1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the telecommunications field and, in particular, to a media gateway that implements a shared risk group package to indicate to a media gateway whether or not the media gateway should use resources which share the same risk of failure to establish multiple connections.
2. Description of Related Art
In the telecommunications field it is an established and common concept that to improve the error resilience of a connection that one should use redundant links like a primary link and a secondary link. The establishment of a secondary link effectively means that a separate group of resources are used to establish a connection so that if the resources of the primary link fail then the resources of the secondary link maintains the connection. Today there is ongoing work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) of using diverse resources in a router and network. For example, see the following articles:                Kireeti Kompella et al. “OSPF Extensions in Support of Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching” Internet Draft draft-ietf-ccamp-ospf-gmpls-extensions-12.txt dated October 2003.        Dimitri Papadimitriou et al. “Shared Risk Link Groups Inference and Processing” Internet Draft draft-papadimitriou-ccamp-srlg-processing-02.txt dated June 2003.        
The methods described in these articles disclose the use of diverse resources to maintain a connection within a router and network but there is no method today that enables the use of diverse resources for a connection in a media gateway (MG). Instead, today in a typical packet based network the MG is requested to provide a Termination ID for a primary link using an ADD.req command with a Termination ID=CHOOSE (?). The MG is then requested to provide another Termination ID for a secondary link using another ADD.req command with a Termination ID=CHOOSE (?). It is likely that the terminations used by the primary link and the second link use related resources in the MG such that in the case of a failure of any of those resources then both the primary link and secondary link would be adversely affected. This is clearly undesirable behavior because a secondary link has been established in the first place to minimize the possibility of failure to a connection. Thus a mechanism is needed to inform the MG that it should use resources to establish a secondary link that are not related to the resources used to establish the primary link. This need is satisfied by the shared risk group package of the present invention.